© Nastasic/Getty ImagesA nineteenth century illustration depicting an ancient Greek funeral pyre.
Prime among these, a new study argues, is the combustibility of dead soldiers.
The main source of information on the conflict is the History of the Peloponnesian War written by the Athenian historian and general Thucydides (460-400 BCE).
The book is held to be one of the fundamental texts in the development of the discipline of history - a key exercise in objective reporting, a description of cause-and-effect without resorting supernatural explanations.
As early as 1929, historian Charles Norris Cochrane called the writer the father of "scientific history".
It's a wonderful soubriquet, except, says ancient historian Owen Rees from the UK's Manchester Metropolitan University, it isn't true - at least when it comes to Thucydides' detailed, and famous, description of how the Athenians dealt with their war dead.
In a painstaking recreation of the physics and fuel loads of ancient pyres, Rees concludes that the historian's portrayal of the valiant war dead - their bodies retrieved, sorted according to membership of 10 tribes, left in state for three days, and then burned before being placed in massive communal tribal coffins and carried back to the city to be displayed before a ceremonial burial - is significantly flawed, and may indeed be dead wrong.
Comment: The definition of conspiracy, according to Wiki, is as follows: Politically literate citizens judging much of what goes on in Western politics today, perhaps as a culmination of that which began centuries ago, know that vast conspiracies have been in play, and are evidently afoot (although to place the blame at the feet solely of the Masons would be naive), and so in our highly propagandized times the necessity for people to discern truth from lies has never been more important: